architecture: music, city, and culture: sounds of cairo

"We are usually more touched by what we hear than what we see. The sound of rain pelting against leaves, the roll of thunder, the whistling of wind in tall grass, and the anguished cry excite us to a degree that visual imagery can seldom match. Music is for most people a stronger emotional experience than looking at pictures for scenery... Partly, perhaps, because we cannot close our ears as we can our eyes. We feel more Vulnerable to sound. " - Murray Schafer

" (I propose) a method of design based purely on sounds of site. The ultimate goal is that sensitizing the designer to the contextual soundscape culminates in an awareness of all the sensory and supra-sensory perceptual aspects of the site not only as a source of inspiration and tool for design but also as a means of creating spaces that in turn fully engage the perceptual capacities of the user." - Kourosh Mavash

Both Schafer and Mavash have called for soundscaping and sound analysis to be an integral part of the architecture design process. In Mavash's paper SITE + SOUND : SPACE (presented in the Architecture|Music|Acoustics International Cross-Disciplinary Conference; Ryerson Univeristy, Toronto, Canada; 8-10 June, 2006), a number of representational methods are listed to help instigate the design process:

Contextual Sound Piece: a recording of the aural experience of space, letting the aural elements described the space.

Spatial Sound Instrument: walkthrough instrument to regenerate sounds of the site

Sound Collage: assemblage of aural media (sounds, songs, words, music...etc) to describe elements within the site

Interpretive Sound Piece: free interpretation of site through composed sound pieces

Associative Sound Piece: explorative use of vibrations (inaudible sounds) to describe the site.

The following are contextual sound pieces taken in various locations in Cairo. Unfortunately the quality isn't as pristine as I would have hoped. If my thesis does end up going in this direction, better samples will be gathered during my visit to Cairo this winter. You might want to put on headphones for this one.